run boy run

[foundmyselfagain]

WHO: Gareth and YOU
WHAT: Gareth adjusting to being back from his surprise extended stay in Tevinter
WHEN: The week or so after the rescue
WHERE: Around the Gallows
NOTES: Probably gonna be talk about trauma and how not to deal with it, gareth being gareth, etc etc

i. work

Gareth is a ghost.

He is, however, a ghost with a job, and while his superiors (Salvio? Thranduil? Whatever) would probably be willing to give him a few days off to get over the whole...captive thing, he would prefer to have something to do. Something to occupy his mind, his hands. He's had plenty of time to sit around in a small room.

So he idles around the library, or more accurately, lurks, fidgeting with books in the background, rearranging them, making sure everything is where it should be. He stays away from anyone else, stays silent, and close to the shelves, as though he can make himself invisible simply by not speaking or getting too close to anyone.

When not at the library, he's in one of the vaults, or poking around at one of the old, dusty corners of the cellars of the Gallows, inventorying and tidying. There usually isn't much company in these places, which means anyone who comes here will probably be trying to seek him out to speak.

ii. night

He doesn't sleep much. Dreams provide little comfort, and there's always an unpleasant lurch when he first opens his eyes, wondering if that cell will greet him again.

So, he makes his way to the shore, book in hand. Because, if you're not going to be doing something for a few hours, you might as well read. If the moon doesn't provide enough light to read by, he simply raises the hand with the anchor shard in it, soft green light spilling over the pages.

iii. break
[[ooc note: closed to close cr only!]]

At some point, something in him snaps. Something that had been repressed since he was first captured, waiting to come out, snarling and angry and hurting. He doesn't wait for the Gallows to fall again to let it out, and takes his staff into the training room, hoping to burn that energy on something constructive.

But it isn't enough. Each time his staff makes contact with the training dummy, he imagines a new face, the Venatori, Corypheus, even the ones who broke him in the first place. Templars, Meredith, even Orsino, and it's not enough, he has to hurt them more, give them that yawning pain that he had to live through, that he had to relive, that seems to never leave him.

Fire and thunder break out, sizzling across his staff at first, and then growing stronger as he lashes out with all the mana he can muster, until it runs out and Gareth, with one final swing to the now rather singed dummy, falls to his knees, panting. It doesn't feel better. Not like hurting the Templars did, during the war. Like seeing the people who sought to strike him down fall to their own comrades sword. But he's supposed to be better now.

He doesn't feel better.

Comments

ii.

[exequy]

Kostos hadn’t hugged him, when he came back, but for a moment it had been a close call, with hands on both Gareth’s shoulders and a locked-up jaw. Then the moment passed. Since then he's only watched, quiet and distant, waiting for a break that is coming, soon, but that he won't be there to see.

Instead he's in their shared room, wondering if Gareth is avoiding him in particular, worrying that maybe he's actually decided to die after all, diving into worst case scenarios because that's what he does best—and then he's on the shore, because the glimmer of the anchor was visible when Kostos walked to the dock to look across at the city and try to think how to get over there to look for him. He's still quiet, and he still keeps some distance, but he sits close enough to cross the threshold into friendly.

“Nell wanted to go back for you,” he says. “She had a dozen rescue plans. They were all terrible.”

Only the second part is hyperbole. They were all bad, all long shots, but not all terrible.

The terrible part is the unspoken thing between those sentences. Nell wanted to go back for him; Kostos wouldn’t let her. He couldn’t have held her back, not physically, but she listens to him, and the ice that filled his rib cage when the crystal went silent seeped out into his arguments. Gareth had been caught. Gareth might have already been dead. Adding another body to the pile (already thirty deep) wouldn’t help anyone.

Anyway, isn’t an apology. Apologies help nothing. Kostos isn’t sure what it is. An offer, maybe. Permission to be angry.

[foundmyselfagain]

Kostos is an Ema’s knot of twisted and opposing emotions, opinions, and thoughts, with only a (un?)lucky few privileged enough to see the end of that rope, and try to tease it a little more loose. Which is why Gareth understands. Kostos feels guilty, but he’s not. He doesn’t like the decision he made, but he knew it was the right one.

Gareth understands, and it doesn’t help.

“Do you want me to tell you that you did the right thing?” His voice is quiet, thoughtful, as he raises his eyes from his book, to meet Kostos’. “I don’t think you do. I don’t think that would make you feel any better.” And so he doesn’t, eyes turning back down to his book, fingers fidgeting with the edge of a page. “Maybe if I were angry at you? Yelled at you, told you that you were no better than the Templars, or the Venatori. Then you could be mad right back, argue your reasoning, whatever you said to Nell that convinced her to leave me for dead. Then you could stomp away, flush with righteous anger over it all.”

He’s not sure if that’s what Kostos really wants, if that’s what would make him feel better. But it seems plausible enough.

“The worst option would be, I think, apathy.” Here, he leans over towards Kostos, eyes shining too bright and too intent. “Where I just looked at you and said, calmly,” He says, calmly. “That it doesn’t matter to me, that you’ve already left me once, and why would I care if you do it again? Why would I expect anything more from you? And because it’s the worst option, maybe that is the one you’d prefer.”

[exequy]

Kostos almost gets mad anyway. For a moment his face darkens with an argument—one started years ago and never properly finished, because he stormed away in the middle of it—that if he says that he won’t cross a line, that he can’t cross a line, and they cross it without him, how is it he’s the one who’s leaving them behind?

And after that moment, after he’s realized that that isn’t the point and isn’t worth dredging it up, his face remains dark, just because of how much he hates anyone telling him what he feels. And he hates the look on Gareth’s face. He hates that they left him. He hates that he still knows they had to. He hates everything that’s happened, ever, to everyone but right now especially to Gareth, and that’s too much, so.

So he looks back out at the water. It’s black, at this hour, moonlight only on the edges of the waves. He doesn’t have to wonder; they wouldn’t have been friends, him and Gareth, if not for the war. Even if they’d been in the same Circle. Even if there had been no Circles at all. It’s a friendship shaped out of blood, and maybe, if it washes away, that will be a sign of some kind of progress.

Maybe.

“You’re half right,” he says. “That is the worst.”

[foundmyselfagain]

A long stretch of silence follows Kostos' words as Gareth joins him in staring out over the water. Half right means half wrong, and there's a strange amount of relief in knowing both that Kostos agrees that apathy would be the worst, and that he wouldn’t prefer it. Not that Gareth would particularly blame Kostos, since the younger mage is being a bit of an ass at the moment.

"They weren't even that bad to me." His voice is quiet, and the laugh that follows is half-choked. "That's the kicker of the whole thing. If they'd stuck me on a rack, raked me over the coals, refused to feed me, maybe I'd be more justified." In everything. In giving in to their demands, in acting how he is, in being hurt that they left him—because it does hurt, no matter how much he talks about apathy.

"Not that I'd prefer being tortured, mind. But that I wasn't, and I'm still—" He shakes his head. Kostos is smart, and he knows Gareth better than most. He can fill in the missing spaces, especially when Gareth doesn’t want to give voice to them, and Kostos probably doesn’t want to hear them.

[exequy]

The silence is long enough that he's wondering if he should leave—leave, pack a few belongings from their shared room, and let Gareth have it to himself possibly forever, because if Kostos is good at anything it's dramatically cutting himself off from people at the slightest hint that it's the morally correct option and then missing them from the other side of a self-imposed barrier, like a good Andrastian martyr.

Gareth starts talking again before he's made up his mind, and it isn't to push him further away. Kostos doesn't look at him again, but he does turn his head partway in his direction, pointing an ear more directly at him while his eyes stay on the water. He's still alive. And because he's Gareth, and Kostos does love him in his way, that feels like all that matters. He's alive. The rest will follow, or fade.

But it wouldn't be all that mattered with someone else, and he can't say it's all that matters now without throwing the hypocrisy into unbearably sharp relief: control yourself, contain yourself, get over everything, recognize there are things that matter more than your life or your comfot, the world isn't going to wait for you—unless you're one of the following four to six people.

So he says, "Did you give them anything?"

[foundmyselfagain]

"Information, mostly." It’s something he'll probably have to tell the leaders at some point, what the Venatori know now, what they think they know. But putting it off is far more appealing, and having to explain to them what happened, how easily he gave up, is something he’s going to prolong for as long as he can.

"Not a lot," He’s quick to continue, and it occurs to him that whatever reprimands or shaming he gets from the leaders, he’s far more worried about Kostos' disapproval. His opinions are more important, disappointment more rending. And yet, Gareth doesn’t hide his actions from Kostos. Usually. Probably something about that stupid ‘trust’ thing. "Just enough to keep us safe. Or—I tried. To keep us safe. I just—"

His voice chokes on the words for a moment, and Gareth takes a few slow breaths before continuing. "I was afraid—not of dying, we talked about that. But there’s worse. There’s always worse. And if not for me, then someone else."